PASADENA - A research team led by Caltech professor and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient John Dabiri has shown power output at wind farms can be increased at least tenfold by optimizing placement of turbines on a given plot of land.

Dabiri and his team have been conducting field studies at an experimental two-acre wind farm north of Los Angeles.

As a result, Dabiri said, "much of the wind energy that enters a wind farm is never tapped."

Instead of making the turbines bigger and taller, Dabiri focused on maximizing their energy-collecting efficiency at heights closer to the ground, where he says enough energy can be obtained with smaller, cheaper and more environmentally friendly turbines, providing they are arranged the right way.

In field tests last summer, Dabiri showed that an arrangement with vertical-axis wind turbines - which he spaced more closely together than would be possible with traditional, propeller-style turbines - generated from 21 to 47 watts of power per square meter of land area. A comparably sized farm with traditional, horizontal-axis turbines generates only 2 to 3 watts per square meter.

"We're on the right track, but this is by no means 'mission accomplished,'" Dabiri said.